Carnation Program Amendment to NLC Consensus Resolution: 

Add:

Therefore be it resolved that DSA members will organize in their unions with their coworkers to support DSA-endorsed candidates and campaigns around winnable local issues connected to the following broad issues: 

1. Medicare for All, 

2. Bring Down the Cost of Living, 

3. End Political Corruption, 

4. Unions for All, and 

5. End U.S. Militarism.

Therefore be it resolved that the NPC will work with the NLC and the NEC to identify in priority geographical areas: 

unions with high densities of DSA members,

unions that have historically taken progressive political positions,

unions that are actively engaged in mass-participation organizing.

unions that have engaged in bargaining for the common good,  

unions with upcoming contract expirations,

unions that have donated money to DSA-endorsed candidates,

unions that have run members for office,

and develop training materials to help DSA members organize in their unions around candidate endorsements and winnable local issues.

Carnation Program Amendment to NEC Consensus Resolution:

Add:

Therefore be it resolved, that DSA will have a goal of running 5 DSA members for Congress in 2028. These candidates will run on a platform of the following broad issues: 

1. Medicare for All,

2. Bring Down the Cost of Living,

3. End Political Corruption,

4. Unions for All, and

5. End U.S. Militarism.

To build a base of DSA members, organized workers, and potential campaign donors and to develop organizers and leaders for these Congressional campaigns, the NPC will work with the NEC and NLC to develop organizing plans with chapters to:

1) support local unions in their area during their contract campaigns and new organizing drives, leveraging connections with union members and politicians to craft shared strategy and demands where possible, and 

2) identify and launch campaigns around winnable local issues connected to the above five-point platform.

In the lead-up to the 2025 DSA Convention, two resolutions have been put forward to connect DSA’s political organizing with unions. The first, “R20: Workers Will Lead the Way,” broadly calls for DSA to support and mentor more labor candidates. The second resolution,”R33: Unite Labor & the Left to Run a Socialist For President and Build the Party,” broadly calls for DSA to unite a “left-labor” coalition around the possibility of building a labor party and running a socialist for president. 

These resolutions represent a positive vision of DSA building support among sections of the organized working class. DSA members have spent years building the labor movement, with significant portions of DSA’s members belonging to unions, especially in logistics, education, and teaching. EWOC, a joint project between DSA and UE that supports new workplace organizing, has been an especially impactful contribution to building the labor movement, as thousands of workers have reached out to EWOC since its inception. 

These resolutions also represent a positive vision of DSA building political power. After the loss of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary and the subsequent losses of Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman in their primary elections in 2024, DSA currently lacks the ability to make coordinated interventions in national politics. 

Unions have significant financial resources and the potential to do mass turnout and political education for their membership of over 14 million workers. Harnessing the power of organized workers is critical to addressing our lack of federal power. 

Furthermore, this organizing relationship is mutually beneficial. Prior to the 1950s Red Scare and anti-communist purges, socialists played a critical role in building the labor movement into a powerful force during the New Deal coalition and Civil Rights Movement. In countries with the strongest labor movements, socialists helped design the collective bargaining architecture that governs labor law. Both movements need each other to build a more equitable society for working people all around the world. 

How do we go from DSA members active in union work and labor solidarity to leveraging those members to win political support for DSA’s program and principled, socialist candidates who are recruited from within unions? To motivate our amendments, we present three premises and a proposed strategy.

A starting point is to recognize that unions already participate in political organizing. 

Organized labor in the U.S. spent an estimated $283M in the 2024 election cycle, along with $54M on political lobbying that year to actively shape labor law and other legislation that affects their organizing conditions. Historically, some of these efforts have been successful and account for some of the important legal gains workers have made. For example, at the state and local levels unions have won legal victories around nurse staffing ratios, minimum wage laws, and workplace safety protections that go beyond federal law. 

Unions shouldn’t just be understood as shop floor organizations separately from their functions as political organizations. Every major union across the private and public sector invests in political lobbying. Even unions with the power to cripple the economy, like the International Longshoremen’s Association, rely on political support and lobbying to negotiate contracts.

Today, some of the unions that are most effective at organizing are unions whose members lack significant structural power, such as service workers in SEIU and graduate workers in the UAW. Rather than crippling the economy, these unions harness the power of supermajority, visible actions to create political or reputational crises for their employers. Resolving these crises relies on effective political organizing prior to and during contract campaigns and new organizing.

An example of union-driven political organizing is the case of construction unions in the Central Valley of California organizing for a just transition. While construction unions often oppose climate construction, these unions poured resources into political lobbying aimed at members of the California legislature to actively promote renewable energy legislation passed by the state to their advantage. The unions then used the ensuing regulatory regime to strengthen their hand in collective bargaining. They also used their leverage to build electoral coalitions that replaced hostile incumbents at the municipal level with pro-labor politicians.

Unions judge their engagement in politics by the likelihood that dollars spent will yield results for their members. This is not the same as a primary interest in socialist politics, such as anti-imperialist organizing, even if many labor organizers and union members are personally very sympathetic to those commitments. This helps explain why the political participation of American unions as working-class based organizations does not necessarily translate into support for progressive candidates or issues. 

Many union leaderships chose not to back Bernie in 2016 and even 2020, opting for candidates whose policies were objectively worse for their members. 

Rather than viewing union conservatism as inherently arising from “business unionism” or an opposition to progressive demands, this current state of political organizing by unions is a natural response to weak frameworks for collective bargaining and the hostile legal regimes in which American unions operate. There are certainly examples of unions with leaders who are opposed to progressive demands, but even unions with progressive leadership face barriers to taking political action. 

With a declining sector of the economy in industrial manufacturing and a growing service sector, labor’s ability to exert power through industrial action is significantly more limited, but this does not stop unions from exerting power through political action. Unions hedge bets in elections to fight for narrowly pro-union legislation. While unions can participate in politics that benefit a broader constituency than their membership, they do not have to in order to be effective at winning gains for their members.

Union members who run for political office are also not necessarily progressive, even if they lead with their identity as workers or union members. Dan Osborne, who emphasized his identity as a union member and mechanic in a race for Senate in Nebraska, garnered a significant amount of support from unions and some corners of the Left as an independent candidate. While he ran an impressive campaign in a red state, his independence from the Democratic Party did not automatically translate into programmatic independence. Instead, he claimed to “be with Trump” on questions of immigration and China, and did not support universal healthcare.

Unions today are active participants in the Democratic Party. The vast majority of union spending goes to the Democratic Party and many union representatives run for seats at the Democratic National Convention. The power of organized labor within the Democratic Party was on display during the Biden administration. From appointing the most pro-labor NLRB in the last hundred years to pressuring the German government to apply corporate accountability laws to Mercedes for unfair labor practices against the UAW in Alabama, Biden’s administration represented a high point for what a labor-backed president in the U.S. could accomplish. But while actively supporting labor, Biden facilitated war crimes, genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. 

How do we move beyond every major union in the country backing a pro-labor, pro-genocide president to backing DSA candidates putting forward a minimal, pro-labor, pro-peace program?

Many socialists were unhappy to see the United Auto Workers (UAW) and many other unions that called publicly for an arms embargo against Israel supporting the disastrous and genocidal Harris campaign for presidency. It is important to do everything we can to prevent such a scenario again. However, preventing this from happening will require taking into account the circumstances in which unions operate and that affect the way that they make political decisions as institutions. 

As organizers know, unions must always reproduce themselves as organizations. The absence of any viable alternative to Trump meant that even the unions that supported an arms embargo were forced to support the Harris campaign to try to hedge their bets on maintaining a functional collective bargaining regime. 

Even in the presence of a viable progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders, many unions still chose to back Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries. This is because unions usually need to back political actors that are “the lesser of two evils” to prevent workers’ rights from being rolled back. 

In order to win union members over to our party’s program and, in particular, our anti-imperialist organizing priorities, DSA must offer a compelling case to organized workers that we can consistently win seats in office and use holding offices in the state to create a political climate that is more amenable to labor organizing. If socialists build electoral coalitions with unions on the basis of a minimal program, we can fight to put forward our politics while ensuring that workers rights are protected and expanded. 

In order to win their support for socialist politics, socialists have to work to provide workers a credible way to weave together anti-imperialist and other minimal programmatic demands with the demands of the labor movement.

There is precedent both within the labor movement and our party for that kind of organizing approach. 

In the run-up to the successful 2019 Los Angeles teachers strike, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) spent months cultivating links with various community organizations that represented workers’ and students’ families throughout Los Angeles to develop a set of shared community demands. This positioned UTLA as a vehicle for class struggle beyond the interests of teachers alone, enabling the expansion of social services provided through schools, hiring more nurses and counselors, and fighting to get the school district to build more affordable housing on underutilized district land. 

This approach has been implemented successfully by DSA chapters as well. In the East Bay, the People’s Transit Alliance has built a successful coalition of bus drivers and riders, organized by DSA in collaboration with members of ATU 192. This coalition successfully organized alongside ATU 192 to fight for hazard pay, connecting pandemic protections for workers with the need for safe, reliable service for riders. By connecting demands that were shared between riders and drivers, DSA was able to strengthen the union’s bargaining position while advancing concepts from a minimal program.